Larry Hagman - Hello Darlin'

by LARRY HAGMAN

  My mind generated an abundance of thoughts and ideas. It was obviously due to having a healthy, functioning liver. Also because I was taking massive doses of steroids. But for the first time in years, my body wasn’t full of toxins. The blood pumping into my brain was good and pure. But it was almost too much for me to handle. I was on the phone all day long networking people. A friend of mine was a master knife maker who wanted to retire but had a two-year backlog and couldn’t. So I put him in touch with Peter Fonda’s stepson, Thomas McGuane Jr., who had a passion for knives, and I imagined he’d want the job. Wrong. I put a pal in Vermont who knew about tapping sugar maple trees in contact with a guy in North Carolina whose trees were diseased. That they were elm trees didn’t deter me. It went on like that nonstop.

  I also went on a creative binge, inventing new products. I came up with a fiber-optic lamp that had fifteen adjustable snake-shaped tentacles coming out of the base, each one with a lens at the tip and they could be pointed in different directions. One lamp could handle an entire room. “That’ll be a thousand bucks,” I told Maj, who replied, “Great idea, honey.”

  I also created a traveling suit. One day I asked myself, What does a businessman need when he travels? The standard blue suit. Also a blue blazer with a pair of gray slacks and white slacks. And a tuxedo. The tuxedo is always a pain in the ass because you use it only once but still have to schlepp it around the rest of the time. Then I got the idea and invented the all-purpose traveling businessman’s outfit—basically the clothing version of the Swiss army knife: a light Italian wool dark blue suit with removable buttons. For the blue suit, there were blue buttons. To convert it to the blazer, you switched to gold buttons, which inserted like cuff links. For the tuxedo, you used the blue buttons and Velcroed a satin shawl onto the lapels. With a tux shirt and cummerbund, you’re all set for a formal event. Now, instead of three jackets, you had to take only one.

  I’ve since had it made, it works perfectly, and it all fits into a carryon bag so I don’t ever have to check luggage again.

  I also invented shoes with different-colored outer coverings that just had to be Velcroed. I haven’t been able to sell that idea to anybody, but it seemed like a great idea to me. It still does.

  They told me to rest, but I kept coming up with ideas for gift packages, belts, and assorted items from orthopedic canes to coffins. Maybe all that creativity was due to having a lot of time on my hands. Of course, it could’ve been all the drugs they were pumping into me—the morphine, the prednisone, and the like. Anyway, it was a fun, creative time and it was clear to everyone I was doing well.

  Finally, after nine days in the hospital, Makowka said I could go home. It was less than the two weeks he’d originally told me that I’d need to spend there. (Dallas had spent six weeks in ICU alone.) Ironically, though, on the day I left, Makowka admitted that during surgery he’d discovered my liver was much worse than he’d thought. Without a transplant, I probably wouldn’t have lasted more than two more weeks.

  * * *

  Carroll O’Connor and his wife, Nancy, offered to let Maj and I stay in their Westwood home so that I could be close to the hospital in case of an emergency. We stayed there for a month. Bebe, who’d kept her nursing license current after retiring from Saint John’s, was my head nurse and coordinated an around-the-clock nursing staff that included two others, Frank Horton, one of the gentlest people I’ve ever met, and Rene Marschke, who superbly filled out colorful and happy sweaters. It was a joy to see her walk into my room.

  Linda Gray and Dallas Taylor visited almost daily. They were part of a group of friends and family that tried to keep my spirits up, which wasn’t difficult because I was so happy to be alive. I had a smile on my face all the time. The hardest part was getting accustomed to the routine of taking all my medications. I was on steroids, antirejection pills, pills to counteract the pills I took—twenty-six in all, five times a day. I had to learn how to test my blood-sugar level and inject myself with the proper amounts of insulin, since a side effect of one of the medications I took was being a diabetic. I also had to be extremely careful about greeting people or shaking hands since I had almost no immune system.

  But everything went well and after about a month we moved back to Ojai, where we celebrated the holidays. I was able to attend the premiere of Nixon. Two months later, I got clearance to go back to work. The first order of business was a Dallas reunion movie for CBS. The project had been in the works for two years, but had gotten side-tracked by Patrick’s busy schedule and my illness. Finally, in March, Patrick, Ken Kercheval, Linda Gray, Mr. Katzman, and I got together in Dallas. “It’s just like old times,” I said as I waited for the van to take us to the location.

  “Older, Lar,” Patrick quipped. “Take a look in the mirror. It’s much older.”

  Until then, I hadn’t seen Patrick for months.

  “What have you been up to?” I asked.

  “The usual,” he said. “Drinking and having fun. And you?”

  “Same thing,” I quipped.

  Linda described being back together as a happy déjà vu. Mr. Katzman said that when he wrote the script for the final episode, he thought it was the end of J.R., but greed and lust were always popular. So was the quest for ratings and money, I cracked. Indeed, the movie picked up where the series had left off, with J.R. surprising mourners at his own funeral, explaining he’d faked his own death to snatch his son’s inheritance. Now the Sultan of Scandal wanted to regain control of Ewing Oil. “Are you telling me the thought of Cliff Barnes running Daddy’s business doesn’t make you want to puke?” he said to Bobby in the opening scene.

  It was vintage Dallas on-screen and even more so away from the camera. I was constantly busy running my lines, while Patrick only had to glance at his script to memorize his dialogue. Eighteen years after I first saw him do that it still impressed me.

  “This is such hard work,” I joked.

  “Especially when the check comes,” Patrick said, laughing.

  When we wrapped in April, all of us were ready to do it again. Linda was on board. So was Patrick. So was I. Before all of us scattered, I hosted a dinner, where I lobbied for several reunion movies a year. Especially, as I declared to proper laughter, if they paid us what we were worth—a fortune.

  * * *

  But a great script, not money, was the primary motive when I signed on for the new series Orleans, a zesty gumbo of colorful characters produced and directed by China Beach’s John Sacret Young. It began production in New Orleans five days after the Dallas reunion wrapped. Maj flew down ahead of me and settled us into the famed Claiborne Mansion in the French Quarter which we leased for the two months we were scheduled to film. The home had been the mayors mansion prior to the Civil War and had a gated courtyard that gave us privacy from paparazzi.

  I had high hopes for Orleans. CBS had ordered a tryout of this ensemble drama about a wealthy, politically connected New Orleans family. I played the clans patriarch, Luther Charbonnet, a respected judge who mingled comfortably with priests, politicians, and prostitutes. I’d get laughs by telling locals he was an honest and incorruptible judge.

  Though it had been only seven months since my operation, and I still needed to build my stamina, I felt great. I took a daily three-mile walk with another gorgeous trainer, Allison Zuber, lifted weights, and gained more strength every week. I had a harder time striking the right note with my character. I spent Sundays driving around New Orleans, studying people, eavesdropping on conversations, and soaking up the atmosphere, of which God knows there was an abundance.

  On the first day of shooting, the wardrobe woman was robbed at gunpoint outside her home. The next day, three people were shot across the street from our location just outside the French Quarter. I heard the shots from my trailer. Most of the crew witnessed it. People yelled, “Get down,” and, “Stay inside.” But of course, every one of us ran out and saw the action.

  That really rattled nerves. I remember the wife of Brett Cu
llen, one of my costars, was so shaken that she flew back to L.A. with their infant son. I’m sure others also wanted to jump ship, but for different reasons. The show was done more like a movie, which made it labor-intensive. John Young was also a perfectionist who wasn’t concerned with working overtime. Sometimes he shot till sunup, but my cutoff was midnight. I made it known that, at sixty-four years old, this grandfather of five was long past dying for a role. The kids had no problem working as long as required. But as Cullen explained, “We aren’t as rich as Larry.”

  None of us got rich from Orleans. CBS didn’t pick up the show after several midseason airings drew less than stellar audiences. It was ironic, since the series got probably the best reviews of any that I’d ever done. But critical acclaim wasn’t enough to sustain a series as expensive to produce as Orleans.

  That gave me time to start riding with my motorcycle club, the Uglies. Peter Fonda had been an Ugly for years and he’d gotten me into the club a couple years earlier. Oliver Shokouh, the founder of the Love Ride, the biggest motorcycle charity event west of the Mississippi—it attracts twenty-five thousand riders every year and has raised millions of dollars for muscular dystrophy—had invited me to go with him and a couple others from the club to a Love Ride in Zurich, Switzerland. I was going to be the grand marshal. So Oliver, his girlfriend, Debbie, Maj, and I, and five other Ugly brothers arranged to go there and then take an extended motorcycle vacation through Switzerland, France, and Monaco, where we’d stay on a yacht belonging to my friend Lars Magnuson and watch the Grand Prix car race. Lars had moored his yacht, as he had for years, on the course’s most dangerous corner, so we were excited.

  We arrived in Zurich on a Friday morning. That afternoon I got a call from director Mike Nichols, whom I’d known in New York City years before. He asked if I’d read for a part in his new film, Primary Colors. I asked when, and he said, if I got the part, my scenes would start shooting on the next Wednesday.

  I explained how complicated it would be to cancel all of our arrangements and how I’d be letting down the Uglies.

  “What if I send you the script?” he asked. “Read it and let me know what you think.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  The next day, Saturday afternoon, his secretary from Los Angeles showed up with the script under her arm and asked me to read it. Maj and I sat down immediately and read it together. I called Mike and told him that I thought the script was wonderful and my part in particular was sensational, and that I’d love to do it. There was a long pause and he said, “Okay, you got the part.”

  I talked it over with the Uglies and they said they could make other plans and to go for it. After I served as the grand marshal for the Swiss Love Ride on Sunday, Maj and I flew back to L.A. on Monday. On Tuesday I met with Mike and John Travolta, both of whom seemed happy with me. I was fitted for costumes, and the next day I began shooting my part.

  I shot for a few days and then had a week off. During that time I nearly ruined my chance to be in the picture when I wiped out on my Harley. I was headed from my house to the music festival in downtown Ojai. I wasn’t going more than fifteen miles per hour down a winding mountain road. Suddenly a car came around the corner and I thought drifted into my lane. For some idiotic reason, I hit the front brake, which caused my Harley to go down. The eight-hundred-pound bike landed on top of me, pinning me to the pavement.

  I felt fluid dripping onto my eyes. It was a mixture of blood and gasoline leaking from the bike. I somehow found the valve and turned off the gas. If I hadn’t been wearing my helmet, which I always do, I would’ve been a goner. The girl driving the car tried to lift my Harley, but it wouldn’t budge. I told her to quickly drive up the road and get a friend of mine, John Long, who I’d just seen parking some cars for a friend’s party. She brought him not more than five minutes later. They both somehow got the bike off of me and Lola, John’s wife, drove me to the Ojai hospital, where there were about six people in line at the emergency room. I waited over an hour in terrible pain before anyone had time to look at me. If I’d had internal injuries, I easily could have bled to death.

  It turned out I had three broken ribs, which were more painful than my transplant operation. I was afraid to cough, sneeze, and especially laugh—the pain was so intense. When I showed up on the set of Primary Colors a few days later, my arm was in a sling. No one knew about the accident. Everything had been kept out of the news. That day was one of my biggest scenes, the one when I announced my intention to run for president in opposition to John Travolta’s character. It was being shot at UCLA in an outdoor arena filled with three thousand extras, balloons and streamers, cameras, and crew. My God, it couldn’t have been more crowded, and I could barely move.

  Mike was in front of a monitor, watching a replay from another scene as I hobbled by on my way to makeup. He looked up, probably wondering who the cripple was. Then he did one of those double takes.

  “Hi. What happened to you?” he calmly asked.

  “Oh, I had a little motorcycle accident,” I said blithely.

  “Do you think you can do the scene today?”

  “Oh yeah, absolutely,” I said cheerfully.

  He paused and gave me a more careful examination.

  “Are you going to wear your arm in a sling?”

  “No, I can move it.”

  Truthfully, I couldn’t move it worth shit. But it didn’t matter as I began to feel the euphoria that I get right before going in front of a crowd. I asked Mike if we could forgo rehearsal. I also asked if he’d mind not telling the audience that I was the actor about to come out. I wanted to ride that wave of excitement they would have when they recognized me. Mike, always ready for an idea that helped a performance, said, “Fine by me. Let’s do it.”

  With cameras rolling, I walked onstage. The audience had been told to cheer with enthusiastic abandon, but when they recognized me they went nuts. It was my first appearance in front of a group of people since my operation nearly a year earlier. I felt such warmth and love. It was a sublime moment. I went through the scene, gesturing and moving as if my banged and bruised body were thirty years younger. Of course I didn’t even feel my broken ribs. Nothing hurts when you re in front of an audience.

  Chapter Thirty

  Shakespeare was right when he said all the world is a stage. He should’ve added that all the people are playing parts. This is true wherever you go, whether it’s Hollywood, New York, London, Paris … everywhere. But nowhere was it more evident to me than in Romania.

  We’d been asked to come to Romania to help Prince Paul, grandson of King Carol II, raise money for children with AIDS. It doesn’t matter how busy you are, you can’t turn down a cause like that. We went to London, then to Bucharest, where, as a video crew documented our visit, we toured army bases and university campuses, helped the prince announce a shipment of more than $200,000 worth of medicine, and posed for pictures with all the local politicians. I knew there were tens of thousands of kids with AIDS, but I never saw one.

  On my first day there a man approached me on the street with tears in his eyes. With wonderment in his voice, he said, “J.R., you have saved my country. You have saved Romania.” He went on to explain that Nicolae Ceauşescu, the country’s terrible dictator, had allowed only three hours of television a day—two hours of political propaganda and one hour of Dallas, to show the corruption and decadent morality of the United States.

  Big mistake! People watched Dallas and liked what they saw, and when they overthrew Ceauşescu, they shot him and his wife five hundred times.

  The man’s story confirmed what I’d experienced in Russia a few years before.

  Over the next few days, we toured the old city of Sibiu in Transylvania, where I listened to stories about Tepes the Impaler, who’d turned back Ottoman invaders in the mid-1400s and filled a forest with twenty thousand Turkish and Bulgarian prisoners he’d impaled on stakes. The history was fascinating, but we never saw his castle.

  Then we went back
to Bucharest. The day before we were scheduled to leave, the producer of the video told us it was time to get his most important shot. Maj and I were eating breakfast in our hotel room when he revealed his plan.

  “Now, Mr. Hagman,” he said, “this is the scene where you come out of a doorway, tip your hat, and say, ‘Welcome to Southfork.’”

  “Southfork?” I said incredulously.

  “Southfork … Romania.” He said it as if this was common knowledge. “And then we pull back to show the Southfork ranch. Just like in Dallas.”

  It turned out there was an amusement park near Slobozia, a city in southeastern Romania about an hour from Bucharest. The park was owned by Alexandru Ilie, a wealthy entrepreneur who built a fortune on cheddar cheese, then built himself a colossal tourist attraction featuring a replica of the Eiffel Tower, a zoo, monster waterfalls, and a reproduction of Southfork smack in the center of his three-hundred-acre luxury ranch. Why Southfork? He said that Dallas had become a part of people’s lives in Eastern Europe. Why not give them what they want?

  After hearing the whole story, I looked at the producer and then turned to Maj. Suddenly I felt as if the trip might’ve been a setup. I didn’t know what to say. Fortunately Maj did.

  “No f-ing way,” she told the producer.

  He looked stunned.

  “What?”

  “That’s an endorsement,” she said. “If Larry does the shot, we’re endorsing an amusement park, and we’re not doing it. Larry gets paid for that.”

  “But you are here—”

  Maj interrupted.

  “We’re here for kids with AIDS. If you’re going to do an endorsement, do it for kids with AIDS.”

  The situation got pretty tense. It turned out we hadn’t been told how much of the trip hinged on this particular shot. Apparently there was a whole web of business dealings and intrigue based on it. The producer looked like he was going to have a heart attack. I urged calm and suggested that if he wanted me to endorse the amusement park he should find a way to compensate me. It was simple.